The growing Roza family: Avalon's 1st birthday

We celebrated Avalon's 1st birthday on July 14th. It was definitely a difficult week for us. I ordered a birthday cake in memory of Avalon's birthday, and we brought that with us to the Bay Area where we celebrated. After we lost Avalon, we chose to have her buried at a cemetery in Pittsburg. The cemetery is located halfway between Brentwood (where Edward's parents live) and Concord (where my mom lives). Several of Edward's family members are also buried there, or have purchased plots there already. So it just made sense to have her there.
We drove to Brentwood and stayed with Edward's parents the night of Tuesday the 13th. That next morning, we woke up very early on Avalon's birthday to light a candle in her memory at the time she was born - 5:05 am. We kept that candle burning until we had to leave to go to the cemetery. On the way, we stopped by the store and bought several balloons. We bought 2 mylar balloons that we had planned to attach to her headstone. We also bought a half dozen purple and pink latex balloons. I had planned that we would write messages on the balloons with a marker, then release those balloons into the sky. We also had some fresh silk flowers to leave at her grave site.
Edward's mother rode with us, and then we met my mother and her husband there at the cemetery. We cleaned up Avalon's headstone (it sometimes gets dirt and water on it), and then put her new flowers and her birthday balloons in place. Then we each wrote a message to Avalon on the balloons. Edward and I released the balloons into the air and watched them for as long as we could before they disappeared into the big blue sky.
Then we went back to Edward's parents' house and we had dinner and ate the birthday cake in honor of Avalon's birthday. It was a very emotional day for us all. It is almost as if I can now breathe a sigh of relief that we have made it through Avalon's 1st birthday. We still miss her like crazy, and our hearts bleed for her, but the pain does seem to dull a little bit over time. We are so glad that we have something positive to focus on right now - Cupcake.